The UK High Court handed Spribe, the studio behind the wildly popular crash game Aviator, a procedural win on May 22 in its long-running copyright battle with a rival that claims the game ripped off its own work.

Deputy Judge Michael Tappin KC ruled that Georgian law, not English law alone, governs key parts of the copyright question, and that Georgian court judgments will have to be weighed in the case. It’s a technical ruling, not a verdict. But in a cross-border IP fight, who decides the law often decides the war.

The Crash-Game Clone Wars

Aviator is the multiplier crash game where players cash out before a rising plane flies off and takes the bet with it. It launched in 2018 and became one of the most copied formats in online gambling, spreading across crypto casinos and mainstream sites alike and spawning a swarm of near-identical clones.

The claimant, Aviator LLC, founded by Georgian businessman Temur Ugulava, argues Spribe infringed intellectual property tied to the Aviator brand and its aircraft imagery. Spribe flatly denies it, says it created Aviator and owns the trademarks worldwide, and has called the rival product a “blatant” infringement of the work it owns. Both sides claim to be the original.

Why the Ruling Cuts for Spribe

Tappin declined the claimant’s request for a standalone preliminary hearing on who owns the work, and folded foreign law into the case instead. Because Aviator’s origins trace to Georgia, English courts must now consider the law of each country where copyright protection is claimed, not just apply English rules across the board. That’s the procedural ground Spribe wanted, and it tilts the early going its way.

This isn’t the first round. An interim injunction back in July 2025 blocked a competing UK launch, so the two sides have been trading blows for the better part of a year. The full merits remain undecided, with trial expected in late 2026 or early 2027.

Why Studios Are Watching

For Spribe the stakes are real. Aviator is one of the highest-grossing online gambling titles in the world, and a finding that someone else owns the underlying IP would be catastrophic. Getting foreign law into the case keeps the door open to the Georgian rulings Spribe believes back its ownership claim.

The wider lesson is for every studio sitting on a hit format. Crash games, and the slot and instant-win titles they share a shelf with, don’t respect borders, and neither does the litigation. Proving who owns a game built in one country and copied in a dozen others is a genuinely hard legal problem, and the Aviator case is now the one the whole industry is watching closely.

A Massive Footprint in the Crypto Scene

The numbers driving the game explain exactly why the legal battle is so fierce. Aviator is an absolute juggernaut, pulling in over 35 million monthly active players globally and generating upwards of 10,000 bets every single second across more than 4,500 brands.

This rapid-fire gameplay has made it a favorite in the blockchain gambling community, driving massive traffic to top-tier crypto casinos like Stake.com, BC.Game, and Roobet. Because crypto players demand real-time transparency and high-speed action, the format has become the gold standard for decentralized betting platforms, turning a simple 2D plane into one of the most profitable pieces of digital real estate in igaming history.